Google Ripping off Adsense users?

Have you ever had a really good AdSense Day followed by a “much-worse-than-average” one?

The current way AdSense is setup you have no way to figure out how much money you get paid for a specific click. How do we know that they are “doing the right thing” when it comes to paying sites running ads? I have a feeling that their “do no evil” mantra will be a distant memory a few years from now. I’m actually looking forward to the time when Google is hated as much as Microsoft is today. Maybe when the ipod dies everyone will go back to hating apple as well.

Anyway, if you watch your adsense stats close enough you can more or less see how much individual clicks are worth, or at least figure out an average for a day’s worth of clicks on a particular ad channel. Do the prices paid by advertisers really vary that much? How it is I can have several $1 clicks one day, then only $.07/click the next day for the very same pages? Perhaps the ads being shown are different, but why would they be if the content hasn’t changed? I almost feel like Google has some kind of system in place to “balance” out your earnings. I had about a week straight of good days, then all of the sudden 2 really bad days in a row (with the same traffic).

The unfortunate part is that anyone can speculate about these sorts of things all they want, but since we have no transparency into Google whatsoever other than what Matt Cutts feeds us, we have no way to know what is going on. Some people believe he only exists to spread disinformation. Why would he be feeding information to SEO people when Google flat out doesn’t like SEO?

I’m not really accusing Google of cheating anybody, but merely posing the question: How would we know if they were?

~Wealthy Webmaster